260 EDGE OF THE JUNGLE 
ful and they danced and flickered in the sunlight, 
but this was no temporary shifting to a pleas- 
anter clime or a land of more abundant flowers, 
but a migration in the grim old sense which Cicero 
loved, non dubitat ... migrare de vita. No but- 
terfly ever turned back, or circled again to the 
glade, with its yellow cassia blooms where he 
had spent his caterpillarhood. Nor did he fly 
toward the north star or the sunset, but between 
the two. Twelve years before, as I passed up 
the Essequibo and the Cuyuni, I noticed hun- 
dreds of yellow butterflies each true to his little 
compass variation of NNW. 
There are times and places in Guiana where 
emigrating butterflies turn to the north or the 
south; sometimes for days at a time, but sooner 
or later the eddies straighten out, their little flo- 
tillas cease tacking, and all swing again NNW. 
To-day the last of the migration stragglers of 
the year—perhaps the fiftieth great-grandsons of 
those others—held true to the Catopsilian lode- 
stone. 
My masculine pronouns are intentional, for of 
all the thousands and tens of thousands of mi- 
grants, all, as far as I know, were males. Catch 
a dozen yellows in a jungle glade and the sexes 
